Alternative Lending Leader Gains the Scalability, Agility and Insight to Move at the Pace of Modern Business

NetSuite Inc. (NYSE: N), the industry’s leading provider of cloud-based financials / ERP and omnichannel commerce software suites, today announced that Avant, a marketplace lending platform, went live on NetSuite OneWorld to manage mission-critical business processes. Avant is now relying on NetSuite OneWorld to run financial consolidation, accounts payable, multi-subsidiary management and multicurrency management for the American and Canadian dollars and the British pound. NetSuite OneWorld gives Avant the ability to streamline business processes across all subsidiaries, gain operational efficiency, reduce IT cost and overhead, access real-time insights into its business, and gain the agility and scalability it needs to support its hyper growth trajectory.

Alternative financing companies are transforming the traditionally staid financial services industry by providing consumers with alternatives for securing financing that significantly reduce approval times by leveraging advanced analytics and offering quick customer-friendly online applications. These fast-growing businesses quickly find their entry-level accounting systems stifling their growth, while legacy on-premise systems are not agile and flexible enough to meet the needs of modern businesses, and some cloud-based systems cannot provide the sophisticated auditability and financial controls for businesses preparing for additional growth.

NetSuite provides alternative financing companies with:

• Rapid ROI that traditional ERP systems can’t match thanks to rapid implementation times with minimal overhead in IT infrastructure or support personnel.
• Scalability for growth with the ability to quickly and easily add functionality and licenses as the business grows, and proven international capabilities to streamline global expansion.
• Built-in business intelligence that provides real-time insights into key business performance indicators for a unified view of the organization.
• Simplified maintenance to eliminate the need for costly IT infrastructure and support with a cloud-based system that is always up to date and customizations that carry forward automatically.

Avant, one of the fastest-growing businesses in the sector, was founded in late 2012 by John Sun, Paul Zhang and Al Goldstein with a mission to lower the cost and barriers of borrowing to an underserved market. Avant has grown quickly by delivering a streamlined customer experience that offers consumers responsible access to credit by leveraging an advanced analytics platform that minimizes investor risks. Avant experienced a remarkable 971 percent growth rate in 2013-2014 and expects 400 percent top line growth this year. The company quickly discovered the limits of managing its financials on its existing systems, which relied on manual processes that lacked workflow controls.

“Our previous system just couldn’t keep pace with the rapid growth we’ve seen in our industry and our business,” said Al Goldstein, CEO of Avant. “NetSuite gives us the agility to adapt to change and the scalability we need as we continue to grow domestically and globally.”

After an evaluation process, Avant selected NetSuite to continue to focus on innovation and growth, deploying NetSuite OneWorld as a system that could grow and scale with the business with robust reporting, an intuitive user interface and cloud-based architecture.

NetSuite’s agile, flexible and scalable platform has helped Avant achieve the following benefits:

• Real-time visibility. Avant is monitoring, reporting and analyzing its overall business performance in real-time with NetSuite’s reporting and analytics tools. The Avant management team is able to quickly gain accurate detailed insights into its business, wherever they happen to be, to respond to market changes and understand the health of the business.
• Robust financial controls. NetSuite’s ability to document all journal entries and customize workflows introduced added rigor to Avant’s financial processes, creating greater faith in the data and facilitating audits by key stakeholders.
• Positioned for global expansion. With NetSuite OneWorld, Avant is able to transact in the US and Canadian dollars, and British pound, with near-term plans to expand geographically. NetSuite OneWorld’s support for 190 currencies, 20 languages, and automated tax compliance in over 100 countries ensures that Avant is ready to expand across the globe.

“Avant is among a growing number of financial services companies innovating in a market that’s ripe for disruption and are relying on NetSuite’s cloud platform,” said NetSuite President and COO Jim McGeever. “We’re excited to see Avant’s success and look forward to helping them grow.”

Today, more than 24,000 companies and subsidiaries depend on NetSuite to run complex, mission-critical business processes globally in the cloud. Since its inception in 1998, NetSuite has established itself as the leading provider of enterprise-ready cloud business management suites of enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), and ecommerce applications for businesses of all sizes. Many FORTUNE 100 companies rely on NetSuite to accelerate innovation and business transformation. NetSuite continues its success in delivering the best cloud business management suites to businesses around the world, enabling them to lower IT costs significantly while increasing productivity, as the global adoption of the cloud accelerates.